1. Field of Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method and system for performing searches for television content and, more particularly, to a method and system for performing searches with text entry by a user reduced to prefix substrings representing elements of a namespace containing a set of names composed of one or more words that are either ordered or unordered.
2. Description of Related Art
Search engines have become increasingly important for finding needed information on the Internet using Personal Computers (PCs). While performing searches is predominantly a PC based activity to date, searching has begun percolating to non-PC domains such as televisions and hand-held devices, as content choices for these domains proliferate. Text input continues to be the primary input technique for search engines since speech input and other input technologies have not sufficiently matured. Though progress has been made recently for PCs with full QWERTY keyboards to reduce the amount of text input needed to arrive at a desired result, the search input process is still grossly deficient and cumbersome when it comes to searching for desired information or content on a large ten-foot interface television environment or a hand-held device. In these usage scenarios, the text input is ordinarily made using keys that are typically overloaded with multiple characters. Of the various device interactions (key stroke, scroll, selection etc.) during a search process in these non-PC systems, text input remains a dominant factor in determining the usability of search. This usability criterion typically constrains text input to a single keyword (such as a name) or a few keywords to describe the item that is being searched. Rich text input such as “natural language input” is generally precluded in the non-PC systems not by the limitations of search engines, but by the difficulty of entering text.
A useful usage scenario for searching in these limited input capability environments could be to find information on a keyword a user has in mind, where the keyword could be the name of a person, place, object, media entity etc. Examples of such a search could be finding the movie “Guns of Navarone” (which as further described below can be considered a three-word name instance from an ordered name space), and “John Doe” (a two-word name instance from an unordered name space). An interesting property of certain search domains is that the percentage of names in the search domain with two or more words is quite significant. For instance, in the case of searching for a person's name (e.g., John Doe) in a phone database, the search domain name size (number of words constituting a name—2 in the case of John Doe) is at least two. In the movie space, a random sampling of 150,000 English movie titles revealed that 86% of the titles have name size greater than or equal to two, even with the removal of some of the most frequently occurring “article stop words” such as “a”, “an”, and “the.”
It would be desirable for search engines for devices (with limited input capabilities in particular) to enable user to get to desired results with reduced input representing a namespace. In particular, a search method or system able to perform one or more of the following would be desirable:                (1) Captures information from one or more words making up a name, using a reduced number of characters to represent the original name. The number of results matched for the name entry is preferably limited to a given threshold, which can, e.g., be determined by the display space for rendering the results and the ease of scrolling through the results.        (2) Allows users to enter words in the namespace in any order. For example, a person lookup search such as “John Doe” should be possible either as “John Doe or Doe John.” In this example, “John” and “Doe” is a two-word instance of a name from an unordered namespace.        (3) Facilitates learning of an efficient usage of the reduced text entry scheme intuitively and gradually. First time users should preferably be able to even enter the full string if they choose to. The system preferably provides users with cues and assistance to help learn to key in the reduced string to get to desired results.        (4) Works across search domains with diverse attributes such as (a) size of the search domain (b) the language used for search, (c) the clustering characteristics of names in the search domain, (d) the interface capabilities of the device used for search, and (e) computational power, memory, and bandwidth availability of the search system.        